Friday, February 24, 2012

In going through Sean Faircloth's new atheist strategy, I have reached the seventh of his policy objectives. Here, he calls for no religious bias in schools.

My response to this policy objective - that there should be no religious bias in the schools - is going to be the same as my response to Faircloth's first policy objective - that there should no religious bias in the military. Nobody accepts this. Nobody wants this. Not even Sean Faircloth.

Let somebody try to argue that they have found some gold tablets in their back yard (that have since mysteriously disappeared) that calls on teachers to be sexually involved with their students as a way of creating a more spiritual relationship between them. How much religious tolerance will we argue for then?

Or let somebody argue for a return to traditional Christian values - those that held that God created the black race to be the slaves of the white race, or that if somebody should ever try to argue in defense of some other god the Christian is duty-bound to kill that person without hesitation. Let us argue for the universal tolerance of these religious practices, while stocking the supply cabinets with condoms and body bags.

We are not going to have universal religious tolerance.

There is a line beyond which religion becomes intolerable. Furthermore, we cannot use the standards of any religion to determine whether or not is on the near side or the far side of that line. We must find and appeal to an outside standard - a standard outside of religion.

A lot of people are uncomfortable with this fact - that there is a standard outside of religion that determines which religions are tolerable and which are no. We have lived under this principle for a couple of centuries now, while at the same time we deny its existence and pretend to some sort of "universal tolerance" that utterly fails to account for our actual behavior.

Here is another politically inconvenient truth: Science classes that teach evolution, a 4.5 billion year old earth, and that the earth is not the center of the solar system, are NOT religiously neutral.

The politically convenient lie is that they are religiously neutral. That is why they do not violate the constitutional prohibition on separating church and state. A state government that teaches evolution is not favoring some religions over others - or so we say.
The fact is that these claims made in a science class favors those theist and non-theist philosophies that are compatible with evolution, old-earth, and a heliocentric solar system over those that are not compatible. When the science teacher in a public school tells a student that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, she is a acting as an employee of the state telling children of parents who do not share that view: "Your parents, your priests, and your religion are mistaken on this matter."

It does not matter that some people hold religious beliefs that are compatible with an old earth and biological evolution. That doesn't change the fact that some do not. When somebody steps up to say, "I am a Christian, and I accept evolution," it is absolutely absurd to say, "See, this proves that evolution is religiously neutral." The honest, logically consistent response would be, "What does that matter? This means that we are not talking about you. We are talking about those other versions of Christianity that are NOT compatible.

Where did we get this idea that you can make a logical leap from, "There exists a religious belief compatible with P" to "Therefore, P is religiously neutral"? It is invalid on its face. Yet, many people - many secularists - assert it as a self-evident truth.

Actually, we get this idea from the fact that we need a rug under which we sweep the contradiction that public schools must actually educate students about the real world and, at the same time, remain religiously neutral, when some religions make absurd claims about the real world. We sweep the contradiction under the rug of this absurd implication, then we all pretend to ignore the elephant-sized lump under the carpet.

If we were being honest, we would say that evidence and reason support some conclusions more strongly than others. The purpose of public education is education - which means teaching students these facts, and the evidence and reason that support these facts. Some of these facts will not agree with certain religious teachings. When that happens, that is a problem for the church, not for the school.

For example, I would argue that creationism should be taught in the public school class room. We are graduating students who think that creationism is science. This means that the public school system is not educating them on what science is and what science is not. The public school science teacher should present the claims and arguments of creationists and refute them - this should be a part of science education. In fact, we should judge the competence of science teachers by their ability to do just this.

Similarly, a competent history teacher should be able to explain the value of the Bible as a source in doing history research. The Bible is a part of history, and tells us something about ancient (and modern) culture. The same can be said of the Iliad and the Odyssey - both of which I read parts of in school. A competent history teacher ought to be able to discuss the Bible as a historic document.

Because facts are not neutral with respect to religious belief, the only way to have a religiously neutral school system is by having a school system that refuses to educate. There is a serious conflict between religious neutrality in public schools and public education. Rather than sweeping it under the rug, we need to confront it honestly and directly.

I would not argue for a public school system that is free of religious bias. I would argue for a school system that presents the facts supported by evidence and, where that favors some religions over others, that is a problem for those religions to deal with, not a problem for the school. That is the secular policy I would argue for.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hello! I am a closet atheist living in an Arab country. I personally know and deal with many Muslim bigots who genuinely believe apostates deserve to die. How should I deal with them from the context of your moral theory? If they know I'm atheist they might attempt to harm me (like the Saudi tweeter)

Should I seek revenge? Should I treat them as if I am psychopath only seeking my own benefits disregarding their own? Or avoid dealing with them and try to be independent as much as I can? Or treat them normally while just hiding my religious affiliation?

The problem is your system has consistently left out the Pre-Socratic era of Greek Philosophy. Most atheist Grad students have never read a single paragraph from this period.

The first 4 corporeal systems ere complete failures. The final failure got reasserted by your scientific revolution. 1. What is your answer to the Pre-Socratic era of Greek Philosophy, and Zeno’s Paradox? Zeno of Elea (490-430 B.C.) brought the Pre Socratic era to a close with his devastating arguments against sensation, space and motion. First, was his famous Paradox. To be brief, Zeno’s argument, in essence, is that in order for Achilles to move from point A to point B he must come at least half the space. If so then he has to come at least a tenth; a hundredth; a millionth, etc. He must pass through an infinite number of points in a finite segment. Motion is therefore impossible and space is indefinable. (The essence of his argument is not a relation of motion to time but the impossibility of exhausting an infinite series. Neither is his argument that Achilles has to exhaust the series to the last point for there is no last point. Also, one cannot divide an infinite series. To do so one must assume that the object in motion stops in mid-motion to create a mid-point. The mid-point then is only potential and not actual. I admit that it is possible to exhaust an infinite series of potential points, but not actual points. Also, you cannot appeal to imaginary, indemonstrable units of measurement like Plank Units to answer this paradox.) In a further complaint against the concept of space, Zeno argued that if atoms and motion required space there must also be super-space for space to exist in and another super-space for that, ad infinitum. Zeno also refuted the idea of sensation in the Atomistic system which denied qualities to atoms. In an exposition of Zeno’s criticism of Democritus’ Atomism (Later to dominate the Scientific Revolution) Dr. Clark says,

“When an ocean wave ‘thunders’ against the rocks, no atom produces an audible sensation; but the wave is nothing but atoms; therefore, it produces no sound.” (Ancient Philosophy, 272)

This failure to construct a material/corporeal reality was the formal cause of the atheistic Sophist movement that immediately followed. Protagoras’ Man Measure Theory was the new fad and the idea of truth was buried as impossibility. If Zeno cannot be refuted, the entire Anti-Christian scientific secular enterprise is impossible to demonstrate and should be removed from the category of demonstration and kept in the category of operation.

The Christian answer to the Pre-Socratics is found in Saint Augustine’s Book Concerning the Teacher, where he admits the impossibility of empirical knowledge and asserts that knowledge comes from the Second Person of the Trinity (The Teacher): an immediate and uncreated revealed light.

The empirical knowledge that I am interested in is the ability to accurately predict the future given current events.

Will this drug kill me or kill me?

Will this building design protect me from Earthquakes?

Where will that hurricane strike land?

Science is built on a method that provides an increasingly reliable way to predict the future. Theories that successfully predict the future (can be verified) are kept. Those that fail to predict the future are tossed out.

About Me

When I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to leave the world better off than it would have been if I had not existed. This started a quest, through 12 years of college and on to today, to try to discover what a "better" world consists of. I have written a book describing that journey that you can find on my website. In this blog, I will keep track of the issues I have confronted since then.